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(Update – we’re running this on Wednesday 6.30, on 14th Nov at Factory Mitte, as it’s reasonably central, and getting a room didn’t cost anything. Please get in touch if you’d like to come along)

It’s easy to find the sheer scale of the changes ahead of us daunting if we want to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change, and when we see scary graphs like this showing how quickly we need to decarbonise – and these are just for 2 degrees, not 1.5.

One communications tool that’s been used to help people get their head around just what’s needed, and how much we can achieve with technology avaialable today is the Climate Stablisation Wedges Game from Harvard, made in 2007.

It’s called the “Climate Wedges” or “Harvard Wedge” game, because the goal is to, in groups, put together a portfolio of different technologies and interventions (the wedges) that when combined allow us to go from ever increasing emissions, to a more stable flat amount of CO2 being emitted – combining the wedges adds up to meaningful reductions.

It’s easier to see it graphically, like below:

This game has been used in schools, university and business seminars to help with conversation about climate change, and one of the reasons it’s been successful is it’s simplicity – you choose from a collection of wedges in your group, based on your different priorities, then you explain you decisions to the other groups. The wedges act as a prop to help you talk about what’s needed, and also see what we have at our disposal right now.

It’s also pleasingly tactile, and relatively easy to teach.

Going to zero, not just stabilisation

The thing is though, the stakes are higher now. This was the rough goal of the original Wedges game back in the mid 2000’s:

This is a recent figure from the most IPCC report on staying in 1.5 degrees C of warming. We’re not talking about stablisation any more – we’re talking about an aggressive, re-tool the-planet-like-our-lives-depended-on-it reduction now:

What does this even look like?

Later in November, Alper Cugun and myself are running a workshop at the upcoming conference, Bits und Baüme, to play test a variant of the Climate Wedges game, that tries to address these questions, based on more up to date science.

We plan to use information from sources like the IPCC Pathways to Zero scenarios, and also more contemporary literature like the interventions outlined in Drawdown.

Trying this out together

We’re looking for playtesters who are free one evening after work in the first week in November, and while we havea venue if we have more than 10 people coming, we’ll need a larger venue, so we’re actively looking for a venue to play test this at.

Who is we?

Me and Alper are organising this. I’m a user researcher and technical consultant with an interest in climate change, and Alper is a game designer as well as being a dab hand at programming.

We want to run to test the workshop format before the conference, ideally in first week in November.

The full blurb for the conference

The Stabilisation Wedges game is an educational game used in classrooms, universities and business seminars since 2007, to aid discussion about what kind of measures are available now with existing technology, to stop the growth of annual global CO2 emissions each year.

Players work in teams to put together a portfolio of different policy decisions, and different technologies, which when combined to form a ‘wedge’ to stabilise the year on year growth in emissions, so emissions stay level each year.

However, in 2015, at the COP21 conference, almost every country on Earth agreed to a resolution to limit global warming to two degrees celsius. To make this possible, we now need to reduce emissions to zero by 2100, with most of these reductions delivered by 2050.

In this session, we’ll be testing a prototype of a ‘Beyond Wedges’, an educational game based on the ‘wedges’ approach., where players work in teams to create a similar portfolio of measures, but updated with information from IPCC scenarios and publications like the recently published sources like Drawdown (http://drawdown.com/).

The aim of the game to act as a discussion tool, to better understand what getting zero carbon emissions would look like.

The aim of this workshop is to gain feedback about the prototype – how ‘playable’ it is, how well it helps players have an informed discussion about the changes ahead of us, and where possible incorporate the latest science from specialists with domain expertise – there may be ‘wedges‘ available that we haven’t considered which are worth incorporating into future versions of the game.

This feedback will go into refining the game, which we intend make freely available under similar terms as the original climate wedges game (essentially free to use in educational contexts), and to help with building an online version of the game.

I started writing this in a IRC channel earlier today, but I figured it might be useful share the question and the answer here, to capture it for others. Yes it is a bit lazyweb, but I can’t be the only one doing this, and I’ll share the answer here:

I’m working on a django project, and I’m interested in making a dockerfile so people who want to contribute, but don’t use pip or pipenv regularly, but have used docker before can contribute.

I use circle CI for CI, and I use their docker files for running tests on the project. Is it common/recommended to use the same for easy dev environments?

Earlier this week, I went to an event run at Factory Berlin, about the use of data journalism in policy changes for social impact.

I got talking about Climate Action tech with some people there, and as we don’t have a formal regular newsletter we’d manage with something like Mailchimp, I wrote this email, then sent it along to the people who gave me their email address.

I said I’d share a few links afterwards for those interested in the intersection between tech and climate, and a few places to look to satisfy your curiosity.

I’ll be deleting the form and data in it at the end of this month, but you’re very welcome to get in touch, by replying to this email or DMing me on twitter – I’m @mrchrisadams.

ClimateAction.Techhttp://climateaction.tech/This is the group I joined earlier this year. They’ve been going for about two years, and are comprised mainly of employees in tech companies, trying to bring about action inside companies to adopt more climate friendly policies. These two posts give some useful background:

Among other things, they run an accelerator where employees in companies can find other like minded people in other places, and receive mentorship from specialists or people in leadership roles in other companies (i.e previous mentors have included the director of sustainability at Facebook and Salesforce, for example.)

You can see an example of some work that Mapbox (a mapping company who are used in loads of other products) , and Wikimedia Foundation (the folks behind Wikipedia)

So far, most of their efforts have been working directly with tech companies in the US, but they’re starting to do more public engagement stuff now, to find more people interested in doing something about climate change. We’re looking for people to get involved in both public comms, and maaaybe even replicating the accelerator elsewhere. Please get in touch if this sounds interesting to you.

A whole remote conference about sustainability and climate change

You don’t need to travel, and there’s at least two years-worth of content.

I’ve been thinking about the steps you can take to green the tech sector, and the more I think about it, the more I think the biggest step for most web/SaaS companies, is likely to be how they power their infrastructure, if it isn’t related to employee transport.

This is confirmed somewhat by the CSR reports by various companies mentioned in this fantastic new resource, climateActTech:

A quick way to estimate what your company’s carbon footprint might be is to find a peer who has a similar business model. At most “cloud based” technology companies the majority of the carbon footprint comes from data center energy use. At other companies it might be from fabrication and manufacturing processes, company travel or directly from other company business interests. Here are a few examples.

Knowing where the bulk of your carbon pollution comes from will help you achieve the greatest gains by directing your efforts appropriately.

The thing is, if you’re a large company like Google and Apple it’s possible to do some power purchase agreement (PPA) to effectively power your infrastructure with renewabbles, but as companies get smaller, the options (short of using Google’s own infra, for example) become more restricted too.

So, this piece in Green Biz caught my interest, as it’s the first time I’ve read about smaller companies clubbing together to do a ‘virtual PPA’ :

With FERC’s blessing, Apple and others can participate in so-called “physical” PPAs, where the contract holder actually takes ownership of the energy generated by a project and its sustainability certificates. For those without FERC clearance, a “virtual” PPA offers a chance to buy clean energy from a project at a long-term fixed price without technically being the owner of the power in play.

“Most deals, aggregated or not, are going to be virtual,” Kelly said.

How those agreements are divvied up in an aggregated deal could vary.

One model is to have each company sign its own power purchase agreement — the predominant model to date in the deals that Kelly has seen. An alternative could be an “anchor tenant model,” Kelly said, where one company signs a PPA and others agree to individual contract terms.

In the latter scenario, however, the anchor tenant would become as a middle man that must be comfortable with other participants’ credit ratings.

“It’s kind of putting its own balance sheet out there,” Kelly said.

When you have organisations like Lumenaza offering ‘virtual power stations’ by aggregrating supply from loads of micro scale power generators, and I’m now wondering how small these PPAs can realistically get.

Also, given how Feed In Tariffs in Europe are dwindling over the next two years, it feels like there will be a lot of micro scale generators looking around for new purchasers of power, to keep their plants financially sustainable.

If there are companies who are looking for green power, and providers who will increasingly be looking for new purchasers of power, surely this service must exist already, right?

I’m trying to use this blog more, and really on twitter less as an outboard brain. So over the next week or so, I’ll experiment with blogging stuff I’d typically tweet, then link to it.

I came across a nice mapping between two people I find interested and the mental models they present for thinking about user research. The first is Will Myddleton, and the second is Sam Ladner, who I found out about through a Jools, who I met through the Researchops Workshops in May.

Myddleton’s three kinds of user research

Over the last two years I’ve stumbled into a useful model for talking about this relationship with researchers and their teams. The model helps them understand what to expect from each other, recognise and support each others’ strengths, and work together to make better products.

The model? There are three types of user research product teams should care about:

Sam Ladner’s take

Too often, researchers take their cue from the scientific method. While this method undoubtedly changed the world and our knowledge of it, it is antithetical to the creative needs of a well-rounded researcher. It is especially problematic for design research, which requires creative solutions to existing problems.

Design researchers should embrace less structure and more openness at the early stages of product design, and rigor and structure in the mature stages of product sales. As sales drop off and the product loses its natural match to the culture, design researchers should once again embrace openness in their research approaches.

I use twitter, and I have done since something like 2006. I’m a white guy, with a follower count in the mid two thousands, so as a result, the biggest problem I get from the site is keeping up with all the tabs I end up opening from it, rather than abuse like other folks I know.

I have a revolutionary idea. Hear me out: How about if we *pay* a small subscription fee for Twitter and they stop fucking everything up trying to make money every way except charging for their service.

There was another example, by Ben Hammersley saying largely the same thing last year, but since he started deleting his tweets automatically, I can’t point to it now.

Anyway the gist is the same – why don’t we just club together to buy it out? If we did that it wouldn’t be the same cesspit is now, compared to the fun service is was when we started?

I like the idea for this, but I think it would cost more than most people are prepared to pay – something in the region of 200 – 250 USD is my best guess, to make more money than Twitter’s own reporting said it makes from advertising.

Given that app.net and others weren’t able to charge anywhere near that and fizzled out, I’m not sure how this would end up better for Twitter.

My workings

My workings and assumptions are in this spreadsheet, which I shared last time I saw this idea, and I’d really be interested in hearing which assumptions ought to be updated to make this possible, as I’ve shared mine below:

This is and remains on of the reasons I’m attracted to the web – as Tim Berners Lee said, it’s supposed to be a tool for everyone, not just a small group, and that human potential it allows us to unlock is a source of continuous wonder for me.

Tim Berners Lee, in the London Olympics, with his cameo for the world wide web

I’ve seen a fair few talks, but this is the first time I’ve seen someone in tech talk about climate change in terms of the sheer numbers of people who don’t go to tech conferences who are affected, and how it disproportionately affects people least able to cope with the wrenching changes it’s bringing about.

There was one slide in particular that was particularly effective here:

That said, I can’t say I’m totally behind this approach. and I think, having a binary here is oversimplifying things. There’s absolutely cases where in the global North you’re seeing terrible decisions, but there are also cases where you are seeing progress being made, and that helps set the tone for future, more progressive, climate friendly policy.

For example, I see the investment by Germany in renewables over the last 20 years pretty important for decentralising how power is generated over here: both to bring down costs sufficiently to ‘create options for people’, and also counter the concentration of power among the incumbent providers of energy, and encouraing many more small scale producers of energy from renewables.

I guess the counterpoint here is that China, which (on this map at least, is included in the global south) has also played a huge part in shifting the economics of solar, but that’s hardly been a bottom-up approach. It’s been a very deliberate policy decision, the same way China’s National Sword policy was a top down decision to stop importing so much waste from the global north.

Anyway, it’s totally worth 40 minutes of your time if you have a passing interest in climate change, and you work in tech. There’s also a super handy transcript online too. Enjoy!